http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com --
The issue of welfare reform is back, after a six-year
hiatus.

President Bush is filling out his vision of compassionate
conservatism by demanding that our welfare laws encourage two things:
Marriage and work.

The idea predictably has provoked yelps of complaint from
welfare organizations that make their money by receiving grants and
dispensing occasional checks -- but the president has it right. The best
kind of welfare is temporary. The longer people stay on the dole, the more
they become mired in poverty and self-hatred.

Common sense and research tell
us that people escape poverty when they have jobs and believe they can build
a better future for themselves; that kids have a much better chance of
happiness and success if they live in a two parent household; and that guys
won't run off on their wives or girlfriends and their children if they face
guaranteed punishment.

The president's plan calls for tough love, but you
know what? All love is tough: That's what makes it vital and rewarding.

The Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence survived as
long as the average mosquito -- about two days.

No sooner had Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced plans to elevate an obscure information
center to office status than reporters began claiming the outfit might
spread government-sanctioned disinformation lies designed to deceive an
enemy.

Within mere hours, Pentagon flaks were scampering to microphones,
claiming they never would lie to journalists and declaring the office dead
before arrival.

Here's the interesting thing about this controversy.
Politicians lie to reporters every day, in far grosser and grander ways than
anything Pentagon planners could conceive. And yet media outfits transmit
this stuff unquestioningly and without hesitation branding each new fib
"news."

Personally, I think lying is bad policy, and nobody in government
should practice it. But members of the journalism establishment shouldn't
act as if they're shocked. For if they aren't and they really don't know
they're disseminating political falsehoods then we've really got a story
truly.

The murder and mutilation of Daniel Pearl ought to make
several things very clear. First, the war on terror has just begun. We're
dealing with people who love to murder others, who have contempt for the
United States, our values, and the sanctity of human life. They're evil --
but they're also determined.

Second, we are different. We don't target
civilians for murder, much less ritual slaughter, and we treat our enemies
with far more compassion than they treat us. The butchery of Daniel Pearl
exposes the hollow silliness of the complaints that we were being too nasty
with the prisoners at Camp X-Ray.

Third: Even now, when our instincts tell
us to rise up and crush our enemies, we need to temper our determination
with humility -- taking care to single out true agents of evil, rather than
whole nations.

But make no mistake: We must capture and punish Pearl's
killers -- and we must throw into our attackers a combination of certainty
and fear -- certainty that we will act, and a fear of what will happen to
them when we
do.